


Tie Line

by greenjudy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M, post-Reichenbach Fall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-08
Updated: 2012-09-08
Packaged: 2017-11-13 19:26:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenjudy/pseuds/greenjudy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>I’m sending,</em> he thinks. <em>I have to send, but it’s not safe, you cannot receive.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Tie Line

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aderyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/gifts).



_Cork City_

The window doesn’t close. Sorry. _It_ is true, but the frame has warped around it. 

It’s damp. It’s never not damp. It’s not just the window letting it in, the window’s contribution is afterthought; it’s the walls, the ceiling, the carpeting, everything gleaming, faintly mildewed. It might be cold, but he can’t feel it – sorry, must have mislaid his skin, his cells. He keeps his coat on indoors, forgets the coin-operated heat, forgets the egg flower soup takeout on the broken cooker. 

The window banging in its casement, no rhythm in it, erratic, queer—

_That_ takes him back, fled and back again, all the way back to nineteen and another grotty bedsit, another grimy window that didn’t shut properly. Skin gone almost blue, he’s mouse-haunted, strung out, sitting on the sill, staring down the Magazine Road, watching the water cut a line along the stones. 

A bad connection: well, not inaccurate. It was a bad connection. 

And the voices, crackling down the line: arguments, expensive arguments, with his brother: no, _not_ dead, for God’s sake, only missing, and for good reason, you stupid berk. 

Back in the corner. Only he’s his mobile, now, and the webcam hack that lets him watch the yard, track motion past his doorway, lighting the room through his laptop screen, all night long. 

The window is banging again. No significance. The wind authored it, that’s all. 

 

\--

He’s parsing feeds, dozens of them. 

Amazing to imagine that other one, living that other life; amazing, what he was like, when he was alive. Combing the feeds for crumbs of information? Never. Dull. 

All the things, all the things he didn’t need when he was alive.

It’s on a perpetual sift. He’s looking for specific footprints, the track of a hunter who doesn’t leave tracks. He is pretty sure that Moran has taken a flat close to the surgery. Consider that: every morning, maybe, he passes John, armed with a croissant and a cup of coffee, plausible as hell. 

John is still alive. John is still alive, but Moran is watching him. John, if he knew…

Moran is watching John, looking for _him._

Moran is watching _him_ through John; he’s suspicious. He knows in his gut that Moran knows: the ruse is incomplete; he has twigged. 

John must not know; John must not know, he must not be a legible text. Moran would read him, and tear him up, and throw him away. 

 

\--

He eats. 

John, he knows his Morse code. Shines in lights, shows up in sound, you could draw it in the dirt if you had to, dots and dashes, signal.

But this isn’t a message to John, to hide from his enemies. 

He has to hide this message from John himself. 

_I’m sending,_ he thinks. _I have to send, but it’s not safe, you cannot receive._

 

\--

He’s walking, hands in pockets, past the hewn stones of Finbarr Cathedral. 

On this quiet backstreet, nothing has changed. The wall he climbed is still there. The graves are the same. 

The mobile’s in his pocket; he hasn’t used it to talk to anyone for months. It feels like years. It feels like years since he’s heard his own voice. 

Above his head, phone lines on poles, parallels converging in the distance. 

How long, he thinks, we’ve been communicating at a remove. There are proto-signs turning up in China, over six thousand years old. Dispatches from human hell, marked on tortoise shell, emerging, God knows how long it took, from the cracks that would form when the shells were put to the fire. Ancient email, it pleases him to think: but sent to whom? Glyphs, offerings, looking for a recipient in the smoke, in the sky. 

According to priest and scribe, these messages were marked “read.” 

He wonders if that had been enough. 

 

\--

He’s standing on the low-slung cement bridge, down by the River Lee, not far from the Beamish Brewery. The railings are red and half-eaten by rust. Steps drop straight down into water the color of stout, and disappear. 

At nineteen, he’d waded in, curious, and halfway down, he saw where the steps led to. 

It had been an hour before he found the courage to back out of the water. 

 

\--

At thirty-four, his life had ended; the last noise he heard was noise that acted like signal. 

Scratch that, the _last_ noise he heard was the gun. 

The cruelty of that, noise that was almost code; a fish hook, meaningless. 

There was no need to decode the sound of the gun. 

 

\--

Alexander Graham Bell, the man who made the phones ring, had not been planning to connect idiots on airplanes with their porn. He was reaching for ways to communicate beyond his power, to receive messages from the deaf…from the dead. 

The tie to a deaf wife, bound to his side with signs. And well before that, a compact with the brother, dead of tuberculosis: We’ll write. We’ll make it known. You and/or I will reach a filament across that abyss. 

There will be a signal. 

We promised. 

 

\--

Birds on the water.

If sound can travel a wire for miles, sound, Bell had reasoned, could travel from the land of the dead. 

On what carrier? 

Just who was Bell trying to reach with his phone? 

 

\--

It’s raw and grey, afternoon ending, when he gets back to the bedsit. 

A tieline, he thinks, is a communication connection between extensions of a private telephone system. 

Private. No access. Sorry. So private, actually…

So private, the other side cannot be permitted to hear. 

He taps it out on the edge of the table, where the plywood layers have frayed apart. 

 

\--

Restless, devising, waiting. 

A certain latency is involved. Like, not unlike, the lag between when the gun fired and when his life ended. 

The cruelty of sound that was not code.

The cruelty he imposed on John. 

The cruelty he imposes on himself, crafting a code that must not be deciphered, not at any cost.

A certain latency. Without spaces between we couldn’t make out the signal, could we? 

How can he communicate, how can he touch that hand? The mobile in it. 

If sound can travel wirelessly across an abyss, if text can fly, something, he reasons, could travel out of the dead land. 

\--

 

_John,_ he thinks, _I’ve decided to take a chance: desperate, sorry._

Reaching out through a haze of static, he hides the truth in data points: spam links, deleted, surely. Deleted, almost certainly. 

 

\--

Later, he’s in the corner, lying on top of his made bed, staring into the dark. Words reverberate, Bell’s words, the first words transmitted in telephony, the first voice in history to ride a wire, bundled in junk and mailed to John: 

“Mr Watson—come here—I want to see you.”


End file.
